The ‘Two Lives’ of Esping-Andersen and the Revival of a Research Programme: Gender equality, employment and redistribution in contemporary social policy

Abstract

This work contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it summarises key concepts and insights from Esping-Andersen’s corpus, retracing his work in ‘two lives’: (1) ‘the foundations, or the welfare state between states and markets’ and (2) ‘the demographic turn’. This periodisation of Esping-Andersen work connects his contributions to the long-term evolution of social policy as a field of study. Second, it critically analyses this corpus, highlighting contradictions between the two lives and how this raises questions for contemporary social policy analyses about gender equality, employment and redistribution. Social policy studies should take stock of Esping-Andersen’s work holistically and critically, going beyond a simplistic use of welfare regime typologies and the universal proposition of a Scandinavian style social investment approach, which overlooks the different positions countries assume within global political economy, the distributional conflict, and the complex intersection between gender and class. This article re-embeds social policy studies into international political economy, proposes an account of demographic trends and family dynamics investigated in Esping-Andersen’s ‘second life’, yet recasts the connection between states and markets made by Esping-Andersen, ideas developed during his ‘first life’.